Physical Salary VR

View Your Salary in Real Time!

Video Demo

Project Description & Motivation

Our scene is a VR experience built to portray and (literally) materialize the
difference in daily earnings by different levels of income. This concept and
the motivation behind our project comes from the following XKCD article titled
Physical Salary: https://what-if.xkcd.com/118/. The article imagines a scenario
in which the earnings by a certain worker is spawned physically into the room
every second throughout the length of a work day. The sheer difference in
earnings per second, minute, hour or day earned by different workers is easily
analyzed using this method.

We used this method in our project to display the difference in earnings by
income level. The level is split into two sections, the main hall and the
comparator room.

The main hall has three sections, separated by income level: low, medium and
high. Each income section has three glass rooms in which a different kind of
worker, such
as a janitor or teacher, and have been assigned an income dispenser set to the
average earnings of their profession. When the user toggles the panel in front
of a room, money (coins or other) will be spawned at an equivalent rate to how
much that worker would earn per second on the job.

The comparator room allows the user to spawn in two different rooms from the
main area and observe them side-by-side. There are two glass rooms here, with a
panel in front allowing the user to select which worker they would like to see.

Learning Objective

After the VR experience, participants will have a more profound understanding
in the difference of wealth earned between varying income levels.